"Failed to open descriptor file" error when opening uproject file on local network - solution

for people who have the habit of opening unreal files that are on another computer on a network, and are having this problem here with UE 5.1:
“Failed to open descriptor file”
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I’ll leave here the solution I found, very simple. You just have to go to the folder where your project is, right-click and select the option “Map network drive”

You will choose the letter of the drive you want to create, leave the option “Reconnect at sign-in” checked and click on finish.
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Windows will create a location as if it were a drive on the computer itself, opening the file through that drive I no longer had the “Failed to open descriptor file” problem, everything worked correctly.
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I fixed this by simply specifying the full path to the .uproject, starting from the drive.

how do you specify the full path to the .uproject, from where?

I use this command:

"C:\Program Files\Epic Games\UE_5.2\Engine\Binaries\Win64\UnrealEditor.exe" "C:\MyProjectFolder\MyProject.uproject" -run=DerivedDataCache -fill

you can add -ddc=noshared to the end if you are working on the project alone and using one pc

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how do you specify a path for us dummies

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Yes, for dummies :smiley:
I had the same error but in different situation, I was working locally on my PC, not in network. Opening the uproject file directly worked, but when I launched Local Windows Debugger in Visual Studio then the error occured.

I managed to fix my problem the “hard way” :smiley:
I removed the .sln and .vsconfig files and removed the directories: .vs, Binaries, DerivedDataCache, Intermediate and Saved.
Then I generated Visual Studio files again and it works now :smiley:
Yes I know, this was brute force but I got the job done :wink:

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